The
1955 Kasztner libel case: the verdict of Judge Benjamin
Halevi

The state of
Israel claimed that Malkiel Grünwald's allegations
against Kasztner were a lie. When Grünwald
published these accusations, the Israeli Government did
rather more than demand that his views should not be
broadcast. Because a prominent Zionist official (Dr. Kastner
was a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry) was
involved, the Attorney General of the State of Israel
prosecuted Grünwald for criminal libel. Let the verdict
of Judge Benjamin Halevi (who later became one of the panel
of three judges that tried Eichmann) in Israel's District
Court of Jerusalem speak for itself.

The Attorney
General v. Malkiel Grünwald

This
material should be studied carefully. The masses of Jews
from Hungary's ghettos obediently boarded the deportation
trains without knowing their fate. They were full of
confidence in the false information that they were being
transferred to Kenyermeze. The Nazis could not have
misled the masses of Jews so conclusively had they not
spread their false information through Jewish
channels.

The Jews
of the ghettos would not have trusted the Nazi or
Hungarian rulers. But they had trust in their Jewish
leaders. Eichmann and others used this known fact as part
of their calculated plan to mislead the Jews. They were
able to deport the Jews to their extermination by the
help of Jewish leaders. The false information was spread
by the Jewish leaders. The local leaders of the Jews of
Kluj and Nodvarod knew that other leaders were spreading
such false information and did not protest. Those of the
Jews who tried to warn their friends of the truth were
persecuted by the Jewish leaders in charge of the local
'rescue work'. The trust of the Jews in the misleading
information and their lack of knowledge that their wives,
children and themselves were about to be deported to the
gas chambers of Auschwitz led the victims to remain
quiescent in their ghettos. It seduced them into not
resisting or hampering the deportation orders. Dozens of
thousands of Jews were guarded in their ghettos by a few
dozen police. Yet even vigorous young Jews made no
attempt to overpower these few guards and escape to
nearby Rumania. No resistance activities to the
deportations were organized in these ghettos. And the
Jewish leaders did everything in their power to soothe
the Jews in the ghettos and to prevent such resistance
activities. The same Jews who spread in Kluj and Nodvarod
the false rumor of Kenyermeze, or confirmed it, the same
public leaders who did not warn their own people against
the misleading statements, the same Jewish leaders who
did not organize any resistance or any sabotage of
deportations . . . these same leaders did not join the
people of their community in their ride to Auschwitz, but
were all included in the Rescue train. The Nazi
organizers of extermination and the perpetrators of
extermination permitted Rudolf Kastner and the members of
the Jewish Council in Budapest to save themselves, their
relatives, and friends. The Nazis did this as a means of
making the local Jewish leaders, whom they favoured,
dependent on the Nazi regime, dependent on its good will
during the time of its fatal deportation schedule. In
short, the Nazis succeeded in bringing the Jewish leaders
into collaboration with the Nazis at the time of the
catastrophe.

The Nazi
chiefs knew that the Zionists were a most vital element
in Jewry and the most trusted by the Jews. The Nazis drew
a lesson from the Warsaw ghetto and other belligerent
ghettos. They learned that Jews were able to sell their
lives very expensively if honorably guided. Eichmann did
not want a second Warsaw. For this reason, the Nazis
exerted themselves to mislead and bribe the Jewish
leaders. The personality of Rudolph Kastner made him a
convenient catspaw for Eichmann and his clique, to draw
into collaboration and make their task
easier.

The
question here is not, as stated by the Attorney General
in his summation, whether members of the Jewish Rescue
Committee were or were not capable of fulfilling their
duty without the patronage of the S.S. chiefs. It is
obvious that without such S.S. Nazi patronage the Jewish
Rescue Committee could not have existed, and could have
acted only as an underground. The question is, as put by
the lawyer for the defense, why were the Nazis interested
in the existence of the Rescue Committee? Why did the
S.S. chiefs make every effort to encourage the existence
of the Jewish Rescue Committee? Did the exterminators
turn into rescuers?

The same
question rises concerning the rescue of prominent Jews by
these German killers of Jews. Was the rescue of such Jews
a part of the extermination plan of the killers ? The
support given by the extermination leaders to Kastner's
Rescue Committee proves that indeed there was a place for
Kastner and his friends in their Final Solution for the
Jews of Hungary - their total annihilation. The Nazi's
patronage of Kastner, and their agreement to let him save
six hundred prominent Jews, were part of the plan to
exterminate the Jews. Kastner was given a chance to add a
few more to that number. The bait attracted him. The
opportunity of rescuing prominent people appealed to him
greatly. He considered the rescue of the most important
Jews as a great personal success and a success for
Zionism. It was a success that would also justify his
conduct - his political negotiation with Nazis and the
Nazi patronage of his committee. When Kastner received
this present from the Nazis, Kastner sold his soul to the
German Satan.

The
sacrifice of the vital interests of the majority of the
Jews, in order to rescue the prominents, was the basic
element in the agreement between Kastner and the Nazis.
This agreement fixed the division of the nation into two
unequal camps: a small fragment of prominents, whom the
Nazis promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the
great majority or Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis
designated for death, on the other hand. An imperative
condition for the rescue of the first camp by the Nazis
was that Kastner will not interfere in the action of the
Nazis against the other camp and will not hamper them in
its extermination. Kastner fulfilled this condition. He
concentrated his efforts in the rescue of the prominents
and treated the camp of the doomed as if they had already
been wiped out from the book of the living. One cannot
estimate the damage caused by Kastner's collaboration and
put down the number of victims which it cost Hungarian
Jews. These are not only the thousands of Jews in
Nodvarod or any other community in the border area, Jews
who could escape through the border, had the chief of
their rescue committee fulfilled his duty toward
them.

All of
Kastner's answers in his final testimony were a constant
effort to evade this truth. Kastner has tried to escape
through every crack he could find in the wall of
evidence. When one crack was sealed in his face, he
darted quickly to another".

Judge Halevi
reverts to the meeting of Kastner with the S.S. officers
Becher and Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz at the time
when the 'new line' of rescuing Jews was revealed by Hoess.
He says:

From
this gathering in Budapest, it is obvious that the 'new
line' stretched from Himmler to Hoess, from Jutner to
Becher and Krumey. According to Kastner, however, these
Nazis were all active in rescuing Jews. This meeting of
these important German guests in Budapest exposes the
'rescue' work of Becher in its true light. It reveals
also the extent of Kastner's involvement in the inner
circle of the chief German war criminals. Just as the
Nazi war criminals knew they needed an alibi and hoped to
achieve it by the rescue of a few Jews at the eleventh
hour, so Kastner also needed an alibi for himself.
Collaboration between the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee
and the Exterminators of the Jews was solidified in
Budapest and Vienna. Kastner's duties were part and
parcel of the general duties of the S.S. In addition to
its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the
Nazi S.S. opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner.
All these extermination, robbery and rescue activities of
the S.S. were coordinated under the management of
Heinrich Himmler . . . Kastner perjured himself knowingly
in his testimony before this court when he denied he had
interceded in Becher's behalf. Moreover, he concealed the
important fact that he interceded for Becher in the name
of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish World
Congress.

As to the
contents of Kastner's affidavit, it was enough for the
defense to provide Becher was a war criminal. It was up
to the prosecution to remove Becher from this status, if
they wished to negate the affidavit. The Attorney General
admitted in his summation that Becher was a war criminal.
The lies in the contents of Kastner's affidavit, the lies
in his testimony concerning the document, and Kastner's
knowing participation in the activities of Nazi war
criminals, and his participation in the last minute fake
rescue activities - all these combine to show one
overwhelming truth - that this affidavit was not given in
good faith. Kastner knew well, as he himself testified,
that Becher had never stood up against the stream of
Jewish extermination, as Kastner has declared in the
affidavit. The aims of Becher and his superior, Himmler,
were not to save Jews but to serve the Nazi regime with
full compliance.

These is
not truth and no good faith in Kastner's testimony, 'I
never doubted for one moment the good intention of good
Becher'. It is clear that the positive recommendation by
Kastner, not only in his own name but also in the name of
the Jewish Agency and the Jewish World Congress was of
decisive importance for Becher. Kastner did not
exaggerate when he said that Becher was released by the
Allies because of his personal intervention. The lies in
the affidavit of Kastner and the contradictions and
various pretexts, which were proven to be lies, were
sufficient to annul the value of his statements and to
prove that there was no good faith in his testimony in
favor of this German war criminal. Kastner's affidavit in
favor of Becher was a wilfully false affidavit given in
favor of a war criminal to save him from trial and
punishment in Nuremberg. Therefore, the defendant,
Malkiel Grünwald, was correct in his accusations
against Rudolf Kastner in the first, second and fourth of
his statements."

Malkiel
Grünwald was found generally innocent of libel against
Kastner, but fined him one Israeli pound for the one
unproved accusation - that Kastner had actually collected
money from his Nazi partners for his aide to their slaughter
program. The judge also ordered the Government of Israel to
pay Grünwald two hundred Israeli pounds as court
costs.